Tuesday Morning News

Another day, another couple of patents won by Apple. It's really not that hard to work out how this happens — Apple apply for patents, the US Patent Office looks at them, and someone with a big rubber stamp puts approved or declined on their patent application. That's pretty much what happens.

iLounge says there is code in iOS 4.3 that points to an A5-powered iPhone 5, which makes sense. Perhaps Apple should just start putting random extraneous code in all versions of IOS just to throw people off the scent, but then people would just complain about having to download an extra hundred megabytes every time an iOS update was released.

Yes, TUAW, VMWare does bring virtual machines to the iPad, but it's really nothing that hasn't been done or seen before; the VMWare client for iOS isn't, of course, running an virtualised environment, it's simply viewing one over your internet connection.

Yeah but give it a year or so when other memory manufacturers have caught up and like all thing tech , the price will tumble making this a much more attractive option for those needing that extra ounce of grunt. Guys that use a laptop for onsite video work etc need only hook up an external monitor and they would have a very capable workstation.

Yeah but give it a year or so when other memory manufacturers have caught up and like all thing tech , the price will tumble making this a much more attractive option for those needing that extra ounce of grunt. Guys that use a laptop for onsite video work etc need only hook up an external monitor and they would have a very capable workstation.

Even with intensive video work, what would you actually use 16GB of RAM for? Running multiple virtual machines simultaneously is just about the only reason I can think of...

Even with intensive video work, what would you actually use 16GB of RAM for? Running multiple virtual machines simultaneously is just about the only reason I can think of...

Anything that uses a large amount of data.
Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom etc all love RAM - the more the merrier. I can easily make multi GB photoshop files and the less swapping the better.
Garageband or any of the pro tools like RAM
Databases like RAM - and not just traditional databases, but many programs run databases internally for assets and data and will run them better if the entire database can be held in RAM
And let's not forget the all important e-peen. More RAM = bigger e-peen (for those who care).

Do you need loads of RAM if you've got an SSD? Isn't it much the same, in effect? (Let's assume that people set it up right for utilising an SSD)

RAM is just as important as a fast hard drive. Run out of RAM and you start doing this thing called "swapping", which is really, really bad on an SSD as you're constantly writing and reading to/from the SSD.

RAM is just as important as a fast hard drive. Run out of RAM and you start doing this thing called "swapping", which is really, really bad on an SSD as you're constantly writing and reading to/from the SSD.

Isn't that the point of an SSD though? I can see how swapping onto a normal HD would be bad.

I've asked Jeeves and I can't see the speed difference between RAM and an SSD, I assume there is a lot (due to the place in the interface, perhaps?) so this would account for it, yes?

Silly me sort of assumed an SSD was basically just like a crap load of RAM all wedged together....

Isn't that the point of an SSD though? I can see how swapping onto a normal HD would be bad.

I've asked Jeeves and I can't see the speed difference between RAM and an SSD, I assume there is a lot (due to the place in the interface, perhaps?) so this would account for it, yes?

Silly me sort of assumed an SSD was basically just like a crap load of RAM all wedged together....

System RAM is volatile and needs power to retain information but because of its simpler design it can support much faster speeds (usually at system bus speed) and can effectively be re-written again and again forever. Very useful temporary storage with fast access.
The memory used in SSD's though is Flash RAM. It's much slower and each time you re-write a cell it loses a little bit of its ability to be written to again until eventually it fails, somewhere in the 100,000 re-write mark (although is probably much better these days...I haven't researched flash ram for a while), hence using it as a replacement for system ram is a bad idea as system ram is written and re-written to constantly.

Isn't that the point of an SSD though? I can see how swapping onto a normal HD would be bad.

I've asked Jeeves and I can't see the speed difference between RAM and an SSD, I assume there is a lot (due to the place in the interface, perhaps?) so this would account for it, yes?

Silly me sort of assumed an SSD was basically just like a crap load of RAM all wedged together....

RAM and SSD are totally different things. SSDs are non-volatile flash memory, kinda like your SD cards and so on mashed together. RAM, on the other hand, is volatile flash memory — superfast, but unable to store information once you lose power.

The "point" of an SSD is that is has A) no moving parts, which means they're brilliant for machines which move around a lot (laptops). B), they're also insanely fast, and due to the technical nature of flash memory have instant access times — leading to a huge responsiveness boost. Everything feels so much faster with an SSD, but it's really only because those access times have been (almost completely) nullified.

RAM speed is more about bandwidth rather than speed. RAM is used for short-term storage only, so it doesn't really matter how much you have (but obviously the more the better).

SSD speed is more about random and sequential read/writes, as SSDs are used for long-term storage.

Finally, swapping on an SSD is bad because it means you're wearing out those little chips faster. With magnetic hard drives this isn't an issue, but start dealing with electricity and things can start to become unstable after a while, stop storing data, stop being able to read data.